Actually, Palladium says lasers are silent, though most have a sound generator that can be turned off on sniper weapons, and have no recoil.  Other energy weapons make noise and have recoil, especially railguns.

Thank you for finding that rule, Kahl.  So magic shields can 'parry' in what is essentially a last ditch effort to put a shield in front of you.  Same modifiers as dodging energy applies.


So burst vs. pulse.  A pulse is basically a 3 round burst setting like on a M16A2.  They just decided it needs its own name and shit.  Someone needs to get ol' Kev's medications sorted out.  A burst can also be yanking your trigger as fast as possible.  So for you non-marksmen out there, trigger pull is an extremely important technique.  It's more important than lining up your sights properly.  Shooters say squeeze the trigger, not pull.  Firing bursts with a laser rifle doesn't mean you're going all 80's on the bad guys, Rambo.  I'm not going to get into how much time 15 seconds really is other than that being enough time to easily empty 3 magazines with my Glock and hit black every time.  And no, my Glock did not have a burst fire mode.

Why they made the changes is too much to ponder.  So the standard Palladium rules for bursts apply.  20% magazine for x2 damage. Etc.  Just use the bonuses and modifiers from RUE.  Make sense?  Of course, you can't burst a single shot weapon.  Spraying an area does require a full auto setting.

To be clear, pulse bursts can or can't be parried?

The idea for 'damage' in this game is a center mass hit (ie main body).
Pretty much any regular sized shield, like the Flaming Magic Tattoo shield is, covers nearly all of the wielders center mass from 1 direction.

The parry roll is basically trying to get the shield 'in the way' of the ranged attack. Everybody is shooting at the 'main body' so the shield should be hit most of the time....regardless of whether the attack is a burst, pulse-burst, long burst, etc.

Shooting wild, emptying a magazine for a machine gun, area effects...when things are going all over the place should hit 'other parts' of the target, and possibly the main body....even if the rules don't support random hit locations.

IMO the parry roll is only to see if the projectile hits the shield or somehow slipped around it. I am not sure why there is a -10 to parry energy weapons if they are not called shots and they are coming from the front 60 degrees that the shield is set to block with. If it was a called shot to hit the leg....then you have to parry that with that penalty.

Now that is just over thinking.

The rules for parrying ranged attacks from bullets or lasers do not change between single shots and short bursts.

Most of the time you can not parry ranged attacks, if you have a special skill or item that lets you do it with or without a penalty depending on the situation and feature the change between pulses and single attacks and short bursts does not influence your roll.

Most of the 'shields' are actually bubbles and the roll is to see if you get the bubble active in time, the hand held shields tend to have their own unique rules often per shield.

Yes, you can 'parry' with a magic shield.  Megastias and Darvin make good points.  I'm going to keep it in line with the dodge to keep it simple.

so with fireball it says large ball but only hits one target? am I reading that correctly?

Yes. It's counter intuitive. Another reason why direct damage spells in Rifts aren't generally used by PCs.

What's my penalty to try and dodge incoming fire? Despite being in melee with them?

I think dodging gunfire has enough penalties.  We'll say that the distraction and cover of melee cancels each other out.  Use the standard penalty for dodging close range fire.

In reply to Man in Black (msg # 101):

So...-10?

I haven't had time to break out my computer to look it up, but that sounds right.

In reply to Man in Black (msg # 103):

In that case I won't waste the attack. Just suck up the damage.

The knockdown rules from GM's Guide pg. 35 is in full effect.

Not familiar with that.  But, I have my own specialized knockback effect....

It just means explosions and such have a chance of knocking down characters depending on the damage rolled.

In reply to Man in Black (msg # 107):

That depends on character weight, correct?

In a general sense.  MD creatures over a certain number, power armor, and such.  I don't have the book in front of me to give you exact numbers.  It mostly applies to regular size beings.

Unless you have the Knock Back Attack minor super ability.  It gives no conditions or weight restrictions.  Except that the character has to Pull Punch in order to NOT use the power.

In reply to Man in Black (msg # 109):

Gotcha, but I have also noted characters with excessive weight-like me coming in at nearly 1000 pounds, are often immune to many knockback/knockdown attacks. Not the super ability as Darvin pointed out however.

Yeah, I'm going to keep some semblance of logic here.  Anything heavier than a 'normal' being in enviro armor shouldn't be tossed around by typical explosions.  With Rifts being what it is, there is no way I could account for every situation ahead of time.

There is a system for knockback by damage designed for throwing around indestructible vampires.  It is just about the only version of the system I can think about based on the damage rather than some sort of special feature of one weapon or another.

Given how different the special feature knockback rules are from each other I would not recommend trying to merge them into a cohesive rule.

In general I would not bother applying knockback to anything when it is not specifically called for but if you want to add that level of more realistic effects into your playstyle the damaged based system is likely the best way to at least start.

But, we are talking about Mega-Damage.  O could see a hand grenade not knocking a tank over, but getting hit by a volley of missiles might.  If you want to go scientific, knockback probably isn't going to affectva tank because of its low center of gravity.  A powerful wnough explosion may cause it to roll back a few feet a raise one tread off the ground.  However, humanoid robots, because of their higher center if gravity, would orobably get knocked around quite a bit.  Humans and others of equal size in body armor are probably going to get thrown around by railgun hitsm and explosions.

Again, I'm using the rules on pg. 34 of the GM guide.  There are guidelines for size.  It uses MDC as a measure.  A normal person in normal armor could go flying.  Someone like Rod with lots of mass, (high MDC) is not going anywhere.  A tank, robot, large power armor shouldn't be moved by anything short of massive explosions.  You know, the kind of explosions that generally aren't thrown around at character level.